The New Economic Sociology: Developments in an Emerging Field (review)

Eight years after publishing The Handbook of Economic Sociology, the Russell Sage Foundation has again brought together leading scholars in the field and produced this new edited volume. The two volumes share four contributors (Paul DiMaggio, Mark Granovetter, Alejandro Portes, Harrison White) and Marshall Meyer, a contributor to the first volume and an editor of the second. Other than this overlap, these collections differ in purpose and scope. The new volume is thus a welcome addition, useful not only to seasoned students of economic sociology but also to newcomers wanting to survey the theoretical land and sample recent empirical studies.

Where the Handbook cut a broad swathe — over 30 essays, 830 pages, and topics including the welfare state, leisure, ethnic enclaves, and banking—The New Economic Sociology is more precise, aiming to capture "developments" in a field that the editors argue is in its "second phase" and still "emerging." These developments include new attention to relational dynamics, especially through social network analysis; expansion of disciplinary boundaries to include research on household labor, remittances, "intimate transactions," and other kinds of economic exchange outside formal markets and firms; and a reworking of trust, risk, uncertainty, and social capital as categories integral to economic life. Loyal to their field, the editors argue that with an "integrated and sophisticated theoretical approach" economic sociology can guide the entire discipline and provide "an opportunity to reaffirm sociology's historical roots as a social science." The quality of many essays in this volume lends support to the editors' grand vision for economic sociology.

In a thoughtful introductory essay — itself a highlight of the volume — Guillén and his colleagues identify four subfields of sociology that have fruitfully examined economic processes: organizations, social stratification, development, and culture. They chart the distancing of organizational theory from the sociological fold — noting recent moves of sociologists to business schools —but suggest that efforts at reintegration are taking hold. They argue that economic sociology since the 1990s has marginalized race- and gender-based stratification (and attempt a partial remedy in their own collection with four essays devoted to "gender inequality"). The editors have less to say about the sociology of economic development, except that the apparently new "global economy" has spurred debate — an understatement worthy of the British. Finally, in the subfield of culture, the editors point out that economic sociologists have gained analytical leverage through anthropological concepts, including the Geertzian idea of "embeddeness."

The introduction and all contributions in part 1 cover familiar territory: an enumeration of the deficiencies of economic models, neoclassical and otherwise. Relationships are important and methodological individualism, a favorite approach of economists, underestimates relational dynamics (Granovetter). Rationality of actors cannot be explained by efficiency alone; effectiveness must also be considered (Fligstein). The mechanisms of Keynesian "animal spirits" — long ignored by economists — draw our attention to emotions, which matter when analyzing risk and uncertainty (DiMaggio). Culture is not simply a utility function to be added into models, but a way to consider how aspects of shared understandings and practices shape economic relations (Zelizer).

These and the authors' other, subtler assertions clearly establish the necessity of a sociological analysis of economic processes. Still, it is disheartening that in the "second phase" of the new economic sociology, theorists must still insist on its necessity. The editors' conclusion that "economic action is, after all, a form of social action" (9) does not do justice to the two decades of research they highlight (nor to Marx and Weber). If we are well into a second stage, this insight should surely be taken as a starting point rather than an ending one. White's wry comment in an endnote that his own work in the 1980s was not taken up by sociologists until a decade later suggests that neoclassical economics is not the only bogeyman.

If this desire to see economic sociology move...